The Anubis Gates

Coleridge stood pondering it in the darkness for a full minute; then, “I don’t see how I can not,” he whispered, and groped his way to the last cage, where Carrington’s key ring still dangled from the lock on the open cage door.

* * *

The harsh ammonia fumes dragged Ashbless back to consciousness—and the horrible little mud-floored, torch-lit room—one more time.

After the last ammonia-enforced revival he’d found that he was able to remove himself from the tortured body tied down on the table, or, more accurately, to sink so far down into the fever dream depths of his head that he felt Romanelli’s desperate surgeries only as distant tugs and jars, the way a deep swimmer can faintly feel agitations on the surface.

It had been a welcome change, but in this new moment of clarity he realized that he was dying. While none of the injuries Romanelli had inflicted were instantly fatal, Ashbless would have needed the attentions of a 1983 Intensive Care ward to achieve even a qualified recovery.

He blinked up at the near wall through his good eye, noting without even any wonder the row of four-inch tall toy men along a shelf above the water pump, then rolled his head and stared into the weirdly lit face of Romanelli. I guess this is an alternate world after all, he thought with a cold remoteness. Ashbless dies in 1811 here. Well, he’ll die silent, too. I don’t think, Romanelli, that you could extrapolate the location of a future gap by learning what I know about previous ones—but I’m not going to give you the chance. You can die here with me.

“You’re overdoing it,” came Horrabin’s Mickey Mouse voice from behind him. “It’s not as easy or quick as just ripping open a crate. You’re just killing him.”

“He may think that too,” gasped Romanelli. The sorcerer stood in an evidently painful net of miniature lightning bolts.

“But listen to me, Ashbless—you won’t die until I let you. I could cut your head off—and I may—and still keep you alive in it by magic. You probably imagine you’ll be dead by dawn. Let me assure you I can prolong your death agonies decades.”

The doorway was directly behind the two magicians, and Ashbless forced himself not to move his eye or show any reaction when he saw the monstrous forms appear in it and steal silently forward into the dim room. Whatever they are, he thought, I hope they’re real, and kill us all.

But there was a flicker of motion on the shelf above the pump—one of the little dolls twitched, pointed its tiny arm and shrilled, “The Mistakes are loose!”

Horrabin spun on one stilt like a compass and, poking out his tongue until it touched his nose, produced a piercing two-tone whistle that jarred Ashbless’ remaining teeth. At the same moment Romanelli took a deep breath—it sounded like an open umbrella being dragged down a chimney—and then barked three syllables and flung his bloodstained hands out, palms forward.

One of the Mistakes, a long, lithe furry thing with huge ears and nostrils but no eyes, launched itself in a cat-like leap at Horrabin, but thudded against a barrier and tumbled back to splash in the mud of the wet floor.

“Get… rid of them,” sobbed Romanelli. Blood was welling freely from his nose and ears. “I can’t do… another one of these.”

Half a dozen of the Mistakes, including one amphibian giant with an underslung lower jaw and multiple ranks of wedge-shaped teeth, were noisily hitting and clawing at the barrier.

“Open little holes along the floor,” said Horrabin tensely. “My Spoonsize Boys will make ‘em glad to get back in their cages.”

“I… can’t,” Romanelli said in a faint whine. “If I try to alter it… it will just… break.” Blood had begun running from his eyes like tears. “I’m… falling to pieces.”

“Look at the clown’s trousies,” boomed the thing with all the teeth.

Horrabin automatically glanced down at himself, and saw by the torchlight that his baggy white pantaloons were spattered with mud from the furry Mistake’s splash in the puddle.

“Mud goes through,” the creature bellowed, prying up a fist-sized stone from the floor and flinging it.

The stone thudded into Horrabin’s belly, and he reeled gasping on his stilts until two more struck him, one on his polka dot ruffled wrist and one on his white forehead, and he folded backward, his face a mask of horrified wrath, to sit down with a loud splat in the mud.

The Spoonsize Boys bounded down from their shelf like oversized crickets, drawing their tiny swords in midair, splashed and tumbled in the mud and then bounded through the barrier, stabbing the ankles and swarming up the legs of the Mistakes.